The day I knew my marriage was over was the day I received a barrage of text messages from my now ex-husband infuriated that I had secretly hired a cleaning lady. I was sitting next to a colleague on a video meeting and she looked at my phone, after seeing my face crumple, and said …
I am a very, very, very feeling person. Full stop. For a long time, I tried to make that part of myself disappear – like it was a bad habit that just needed the right tool / focus / willpower to solve this massively embarrassing problem. If I read enough books or took enough classes …
We always wish for easy. For less busy work. For more time to focus. But what happens when we get it? One of my super powers is to make order out of chaos – weather that be keeping my family’s possessions in order (Mom – where’s my…) or planning out the details of a Disney …
Over the past several months there has been a slowly growing rumble around Artificial Intelligence (AI).An infusion into every day work.A quiet march of new ideas in my social media feeds. The week after Thanksgiving I was regaling a colleague with a family dinner story and he suggested I write a book. When I looked …
Change is hard at first, messy in the middle, and gorgeous at the end. Robin Sharma I am terrible at asking for what I need. True story. Some people call this imposter syndrome or over functioning or scarcity. I like to call it the mid life culmination of living as an empathic kid / teen …
I say sorry too often. Especially when I am uncomfortable. Or tired. Or anxious. I apologize for what I say, how I say it, if I hurt someone. If I saw someone’s body language shift. Apparently this is not uncommon. Rachel Hollis famously authored the book “Girl Stop Apologizing”. I have an actual necklace that …
“Change is inevitable. Growth is optional.” John C. Maxwell Very few of us became fundraisers on purpose – it is often an accidental career path based on happenstance, skill sets, and opportunity. I started grad school in student affairs because that seemed to fit the bill, but by the end of my course work, I was …
Sunday morning I went to pick something up at a friend’s house. As I stopped by, my friend Katie and her oldest son were headed out to swimming lessons. On social media, she had mentioned how much he was loving his time in the pool. I said to her son, “Hey! I heard you are …
I was an accidental fundraiser. Money made me, frankly, uncomfortable in any situation. But I found myself overseeing a sizable Class Agent program as a graduate assistant and realized fundraising was actually really interesting — and there was an art and science to this profession that I didn’t even know existed. Over time, I learned …
One of the most critical tools in an annual giving director’s toolkit is a gift chart. This chart should be based on accurate target ask amounts for each potential donor in your database with appropriate success ratios. A gift chart should include these elements: So how do you go about making a gift chart? Let …